Competition Between Churches

It's easy to think of medieval priests and monks and nuns as other-worldly, focused on spiritual issues, above the normal strife of life.  And indeed this was their own ideal.  In practice, different churches were often in fierce competition with each other, "survival of the fittest," "red in tooth and claw."  (Not quite that bad, but...)

For starters, bishops and the monasteries/nunneries in their regions always differed on who was the most holy.  The bishop claimed, with a certain plausibility, to be "apostolic," to be the successor of a first-bishop in the region, who had been sent out by a bishop of Late Antiquity who had been ordained by a bishop who had been ordained by a bishop who had (etc.) back to Saint Peter, leader of the apostles.

The monks couldn't claim a similar apostolic heritage (since monasticism only began a few centuries AD), but they certainly could assert that by living in common, sharing their possessions, they were following the life of the earliest Christians, as described in the Bible, in Acts of the Apostles.  Hah!  Apostolic after all!  This meant they felt they really shouldn't be judged by a bishop who lived like an aristocrat, with his own house, his own servants, his own meat for dinner rather than bread and stewed leeks (plus maybe some nice lentils).

The monastery of Cluny, for example, spent much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries claiming exemption from their local bishop, the bishop of Mâcon.  The bishop was not convinced, even when the monks got the pope on their side.

Even if a bishop and monastery were not fighting about oversight, they often disagreed over which one the saints of the region loved best.  At the city of Auxerre, for example, all the bishops, starting with the fifth-century Bishop Germanus, were buried at the monastery soon named St.-Germain for him.  So obviously the early sainted bishops must love the monastery best.  The bishops at the cathedral differed.  (The image below is the cathedral, though the current structure  dates to the thirteenth century, not the fifth.)

At Tours, there was comparable competition between three churches, the cathedral, where Saint Martin had been a bishop at the end of the fourth century; the monastery (Marmoutier) he founded outside of town; and the basilica where he was buried.

Within a particular region, different monasteries would compete for which one had precedence.  In Ghent in eleventh-century Flanders, on what was then the border between the Holy Roman Empire and the French kingdom, two monasteries both claimed to have been the original foundation of Saint Amand, who first brought Christianity to the region centuries earlier.  Saint Peter's, up on the hill above town, rewrote the vita (a saint's biography) of Amand, explaining how he came wandering into pagan Ghent and decided that up on a hilltop was the perfect place for a monastery.

Amand had named his house, the monks of Saint Peter's continued confidently, for the leader of the Apostles.  Obviously, they continued, the monastery down by the river in town, Saint Bavo's, was named for some later, clearly inferior saint.  Now archaeology indicates that Saint Bavo's was in fact the first monastery in town, and the monks there had records to prove it! (or so they said).  For a generation the two Ghent monasteries had the same abbot when they were both recovering from Viking raids, and this was an excellent chance for the monks of both to paw through the other's archives and steal or rewrite what they found.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on the medieval church, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.